Why Bother With All This?

In other words: if you want to run on an Apple platform, why not just write everything in an Apple programming language, like Swift? If you need to ship to multiple platforms, you might have to rewrite it all anyway, so why not give up?

Despite the significant investment that platform vendors make in their tools, I fundamentally believe that the core logic in any software application ought to be where its most important value lies. For small, independent developers, having portable logic that can be faithfully replicated on every platform without massive rework might be tricky to get started with, but if you can’t do it, it may not be cost effective to support multiple platforms at all.

So, it makes sense for me to write my applications in Python to achieve this sort of portability, even though on each platform it’s going to be a little bit more of a hassle to get it all built and shipped since the default tools don’t account for the use of Python.

But how much more is “a little bit” more of a hassle? I’ve been slowly learning about the pipeline to ship independently-distributed¹ macOS applications for the last few years, and I’ve encountered a ton of annoying roadblocks.

Didn’t You Do This Already? What’s New?

So nice of you to remember. Thanks for asking. While I’ve gotten this to mostly work in the past, some things have changed since then:

• the notarization toolchain has been updated (altool is now notarytool),
• I’ve had to ship libraries other than just PyGame,
• Apple Silicon launched, necessitating another dimension of build complexity to account for multiple architectures,
• Perhaps most significantly, I have written a tool that attempts to encode as much of this knowledge as possible, Encrust, which I have put on PyPI and GitHub. If this is of interest to you, I would encourage you to file bugs on it, and hopefully add in more corner cases which I have missed.

I’ve also recently shipped my first build of an end-user application that successfully launches on both Apple Silicon and Intel macs, so here is a brief summary of the hoops I needed to jump through, from the beginning, in order to make everything work.

Wait did you say you wrote a tool? Is this fixed, then?

Encrust is, I hope, a temporary stopgap on the way to a much better comprehensive solution.

Specifically, I believe that Briefcase is a much more holistic solution to the general problem being described here, but it doesn’t suit my very specific needs right now⁴, and it doesn’t address a couple of minor points that I was running into here.

It is mostly glue that is shelling out to other tools that already solve portions of the problem, even when better APIs exist. It addresses three very specific layers of complexity:

1. It enforces architecture independence, so that your app built on an M1 machine will still actually run on about half of the macs remaining out there².
2. It remembers tricky nuances of the notarization submission process, such as the highly specific way I need to generate my zip files to avoid mysterious notarization rejections³.
3. Providing a common and central way to store the configuration for these things across repositories so I don’t need to repeat this process and copy/paste a shell script every time I make a tiny new application.

It only works on Apple Silicon macs, because I didn’t bother to figure out how pip actually determines which architecture to download wheels for.

As such, unfortunately, Encrust is mostly a place for other people who have already solved this problem to collaborate to centralize this sort of knowledge and share ideas about where this code should ultimately go, rather than a tool for users trying to get started with shipping an app.

Open Offer

That said:

1. I want to help Python developers ship their Python apps to users who are not also Python developers.
2. macOS is an even trickier platform to do that on than most.
3. It’s now easy for me to sign, notarize, and release new applications reliably

Therefore:

If you have an open source Python application that runs on macOS⁵ but can’t ship to macOS — either because:

1. you’ve gotten stuck on one of the roadblocks that this post describes,
2. you don’t have $100 to give to Apple, or because
3. the app is using a cross-platform toolkit that should work just fine and you don’t have access to a mac at all, then

Send me an email and I’ll sign and post your releases.

What’s this post about, then?

People still frequently complain that “Python packaging” is really bad. And I’m on record that packaging Python (in the sense of “code”) for Python (in the sense of “deployment platform”) is actually kind of fine right now; if what you’re trying to get to is a package that can be pip installed, you can have a reasonably good experience modulo a few small onboarding hiccups that are well-understood in the community and fairly easy to overcome.

However, it’s still unfortunately hard to get Python code into the hands of users who are not also Python programmers with their own development environments.

My goal here is to document the difficulties themselves to try to provide a snapshot of what happens if you try to get started from scratch today. I think it is useful to record all the snags and inscrutable error messages that you will hit in a row, so we can see what the experience really feels like.

I hope that everyone will find it entertaining.

• Other Mac python programmers might find pieces of trivia useful, and
• Linux users will have fun making fun of the hoops we have to jump through on Apple platforms,

but the main audience is the maintainers of tools like Briefcase and py2app to evaluate the new-user experience holistically, and to see how much the use of their tools feels like this. This necessarily includes the parts of the process that are not actually packaging.

This is why I’m starting from the beginning again, and going through all the stuff that I’ve discussed in previous posts again, to present the whole experience.

Here Goes

So, with no further ado, here is a non-exhaustive list of frustrations that I have encountered in this process:

• Okay. Time to get started. How do I display a GUI at all? Nothing happens when I call some nominally GUI API. Oops: I need my app to exist in an app bundle, which means I need to have a framework build. Time to throw those partially-broken pyenv pythons in the trash; best to use the official python.org from here on out.
• Bonus Frustration since I’m using AppKit directly: why is my app segfaulting all the time? Oh, target is a weak reference in objective C, so if I make a window and put a button in it that points at a Python object, the Python interpreter deallocates it immediately because only the window (which is “nothing” as it’s a weakref) is referring to it. I need to start stuffing every Python object that talks to a UI element like a window or a button into a global list, or manually calling .retain() on all of them and hoping I don’t leak memory.
• Everything seems to be using the default Python Launcher icon, and the app menu says “Python”. That wouldn’t look too good to end users. I should probably have my own app.
• I’ll skip the part here where the author of a new application might have to investigate py2app, briefcase, pyoxidizer, and pyinstaller separately and try to figure out which one works the best right now. As I said above, I started with py2app and I’m stubborn to a fault, so that is the one I’m going to make work.
• Now I need to set up py2app. Oops, I can’t use pyproject.toml any more, time to go back to setup.py.
• Now I built it and the the app is crashing on startup when I click on it. I can’t see a traceback anywhere, so I guess I need to do something in the console.
  • Wow; the console is an unusable flood of useless garbage. Forget that.
  • I guess I need to run it in the terminal somehow. After some googling I figure out it’s ./dist/MyApp.app/Contents/Resources/MacOS/MyApp. Aha, okay, I can see the traceback now, and it’s … an import error?
  • Ugh, py2app isn’t actually including all of my code, it’s using some magic to figure out which modules are actually used, but it’s doing it by traversing import statements, which means I need to put a bunch of fake static import statements for everything that is used indirectly at the top of my app’s main script so that it gets found by the build. I experimentally discover a half a dozen things that are dynamically imported inside libraries that I use and jam them all in there.
• Okay. Now at least it starts up. The blank app icon is uninspiring, though, time to actually get my own icon in there. Cool, I’ll make an icon in my favorite image editor, and save it as... icons must be PNGs, right? Uhh... no, looks like they have to be .icns files. But luckily I can convert the PNG I saved with a simple 12-line shell script that invokes sips and iconutil⁶.

At this point I have an app bundle which kinda works. But in order to run on anyone else’s computer, I have to code-sign it.

• In order to code-sign anything, I have to have an account with Apple that costs $99 per year, on developer.apple.com.
• The easiest way to get these certificates is to log in to Xcode itself. There’s a web portal too but using it appears to involve a lot more manual management of key material, so, no thanks. This requires the full-fat Xcode.app though, not just the command-line tools that come down when I run xcode-select --install, so, time to wait for an 11GB download.
• Oops, I made the wrong certificate type. Apparently the only right answer here is a “Developer ID Application” certificate.
• Now that I’ve logged in to Xcode to get the certificate, I need to figure out how to tell my command-line tools about it (for starters, “codesign”). Looks like I need to run security find-identity -v -p codesigning.
• Time to sign the application’s code.
  • The codesign tool has a --deep option which can sign the whole bundle. Great!
  • Except, that doesn’t work, because Python ships shared libraries in locations that macOS doesn’t automatically expect, so I have to manually locate those files and sign them, invoking codesign once for each.
  • Also, --deep is deprecated. There’s no replacement.
  • Logically, it seems like I still need --deep, because it does some poorly-explained stuff with non-code resource files that maybe doesn’t happen properly if I don’t? Oh well. Let's drop the option and hope for the best.⁸
  • With a few heuristics I think we can find all the relevant files with a little script⁷.

Now my app bundle is signed! Hooray. 12 years ago, I’d be all set. But today I need some additional steps.

• After I sign my app, Apple needs to sign my app (to indicate they’ve checked it for malware), which is called “notarization”.
  • In order to be eligible for notarization, I can’t just code-sign my app. I have to code-sign it with entitlements.
  • Also I can’t just code sign it with entitlements, I have to sign it with the hardened runtime, or it fails notarization.
  • Oops, out of the box, the hardened runtime is incompatible with a bunch of stuff in Python, including cffi and ctypes, because nobody has implemented support for MAP_JIT yet, so it crashes at startup. After some thrashing around I discover that I need a legacy “allow unsigned executable memory” entitlement. I can’t avoid importing this because a bunch of things in py2app’s bootstrapping code import things that use ctypes, and probably a bunch of packages which I’m definitely going to need, like cryptography require cffi directly anyway.
  • In order to set up notarization external to Xcode, I need to create an App Password which is set up at appleid.apple.com, not the developer portal.
  • Bonus Frustration since I’ve been doing this for a few years: Originally this used to be even more annoying as I needed to wait for an email (with altool), and so I couldn’t script it directly. Now, at least, the new notarytool (which will shortly be mandatory) has a --wait flag.
  • Although the tool is documented under man notarytool, I actually have to run it as xcrun notarytool, even though codesign can be run either directly or via xcrun codesign.
  • Great, we’re ready to zip up our app and submit to Apple. Wait, they’re rejecting it? Why???
  • Aah, I need to manually copy and paste the UUID in the console output of xcrun notarytool submit into xcrun notarytool log to get some JSON that has some error messages embedded in it.
  • Oh. The bundle contains internal symlinks, so when I zipped it without the -y option, I got a corrupt archive.
  • Great, resubmitted with zip -y.
  • Oops, just kidding, that only works sometimes. Later, a different submission with a different hash will fail, and I’ll learn that the correct command line is actually ditto -c -k --sequesterRsrc --keepParent MyApp.app MyApp.app.zip.
    • Note that, for extra entertainment value, the position of the archive itself and directory are reversed on the command line from zip (and tar, and every other archive tool).
  • notarytool doesn’t record anything in my app though; it puts the “notarization ticket” on Apple's servers. Apparently, I still need to run stapler for users to be able to launch it while those servers are inaccessible, like, for example, if they’re offline.
  • Oops, not stapler. xcrun stapler. Whatever.
  • Except notarytool operates on a zip archive, but stapler operates on an app bundle. So we have to save the original app bundle, run stapler on it, then re-archive the whole thing into a new archive.

Hooray! Time to release my great app!

• Whoops, just got a bug report that it crashes immediately on every Intel mac. What’s going on?
• Turns out I’m using a library whose authors distribute both aarch64 and x86_64 wheels; pip will prefer single-architecture wheels even if universal2 wheels are also available, so I’ve got to somehow get fat binaries put together. Am I going to have to build a huge pile of C code by myself? I thought all these Python hassles would at least let me avoid the C hassles!

• Whew, okay, no need for that: there’s an amazing Swiss-army knife for macOS binary wheels, called delocate that includes a delocate-fuse tool that can fuse two wheels together. So I just need to figure out which binaries are the wrong architecture and somehow install my fixed/fused wheels before building my app with py2app.

  • except, oops, this tool just rewrites the file in-place without even changing its name, so I have to write some janky shell scripts to do the reinstallation. Ugh.

• OK now that all that is in place, I just need to re-do all the steps:

  • universal2-ize my virtualenv!
  • build!
  • sign!
  • archive!
  • notarize!
  • wait!!!
  • staple!
  • re-archive!
  • upload!

And we have an application bundle we can ship to users.

It’s just that easy.

As long as I don’t need sandboxing or Mac App Store distribution, of course. That’s a challenge for another day.

So, that was terrible. But what should be happening here?

Some of this is impossible to simplify beyond a certain point - many of the things above are not really about Python, but are about distribution requirements for macOS specifically, and we in the Python community can’t affect operating system vendors’ tooling.

What we can do is build tools that produce clear guidance on what step is required next, handle edge cases on their own, and generally guide users through these complex processes without requiring them to hit weird binary-format or cryptographic-signing errors on their own with no explanation of what to do next.

I do not think that documentation is the answer here. The necessary steps should be discoverable. If you need to go to a website, the tool should use the webbrowser module to open a website. If you need to launch an app, the tool should launch that app.

With Encrust, I am hoping to generalize the solutions that I found while working on this for this one specific slice of the app distribution pipeline — i.e. a macOS desktop application desktop, as distributed independently and not through the mac app store — but other platforms will need the same treatment.

However, even without really changing py2app or any of the existing tooling, we could imagine a tool that would interactively prompt the user for each manual step, automate as much of it as possible, verify that it was performed correctly, and give comprehensible error messages if it was not.

For a lot of users, this full code-signing journey may not be necessary; if you just want to run your code on one or two friends’ computers, telling them to right click, go to ‘open’ and enter their password is not too bad. But it may not even be clear to them what the trade-off is, exactly; it looks like the app is just broken when you download it. The app build pipeline should tell you what the limitations are.

Other parts of this just need bug-fixes to address. py2app specifically, for example, could have a better self-test for its module-collecting behavior, launching an app to make sure it didn’t leave anything out.

Interactive prompts to set up a Homebrew tap, or a Flatpak build, or a Microsoft Store Metro app, might be similarly useful. These all have outside-of-Python required manual steps, and all of them are also amenable to at least partial automation.

Thanks to my patrons on Patreon for supporting this sort of work, including development of Encrust, of Pomodouroboros, of posts like this one and of that offer to sign other people’s apps. If you think this sort of stuff is worthwhile, you might want to consider supporting me over there as well.

I previously wrote a post about shipping a PyGame app to users on macOS. It’s now substantially updated for the new Notarization requirements in Catalina. I hope it’s useful to somebody!

Too Many Secrets

A wise man once said, “you shouldn’t use ENV variables for secret data”. In large part, he was right, for all the reasons he gives (and you should read them). Filesystem locations are usually a better operating system interface to communicate secrets than environment variables; fewer things can intercept an open() than can read your process’s command-line or calling environment.

One might say that files are “more secure” than environment variables. To his credit, Diogo doesn’t, for good reason: one shouldn’t refer to the superiority of such a mechanism as being “more secure” in general, but rather, as better for a specific reason in some specific circumstance.

Supplying your PyPI password to tools you run on your personal machine is a very different case than providing a cryptographic key to a containerized application in a remote datacenter. In this case, based on the constraints of the software presently available, I believe an environment variable provides better security, if you use it correctly.

Popping A Shell By Any Other Name

If you upload packages to the python package index, and people use those packages, your PyPI password is an extremely high-privilege credential: effectively, it grants a time-delayed arbitrary code execution privilege on all of the systems where anyone might pip install your packages.

Unfortunately, the suggested mechanism to manage this crucial, potentially world-destroying credential is to just stick it in an unencrypted file.

The authors of this documentation know this is a problem; the authors of the tooling know too (and, given that these tools are all open source and we all could have fixed them to be better about this, we should all feel bad).

Leaving the secret lying around on the filesystem is a form of ambient authority; a permission you always have, but only sometimes want. One of the worst things about this is that you can easily forget it’s there if you don’t use these credentials very often.

The keyring is a much better place, but even it can be a slightly scary place to put such a thing, because it’s still easy to put it into a state where some random command could upload a PyPI release without prompting you. PyPI is forever, so we want to measure twice and cut once.

Luckily, even more secure places exist: password managers. If you use https://1password.com or https://www.lastpass.com, both offer command-line interfaces that integrate nicely with PyPI. If you use 1password, you’ll really want https://stedolan.github.io/jq/ (apt-get install jq, brew install jq) to slice & dice its command-line.

The way that I manage my PyPI credentials is that I never put them on my filesystem, or even into my keyring; instead, I leave them in my password manager, and very briefly toss them into the tools that need them via an environment variable.

First, I have the following shell function, to prevent any mistakes:

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function twine () {
    echo "Use dev.twine or prod.twine depending on where you want to upload.";
    return 1;
}

For dev.twine, I configure twine to always only talk to my local DevPI instance:

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function dev.twine () {
    env TWINE_USERNAME=root \
        TWINE_PASSWORD= \
        TWINE_REPOSITORY_URL=http://127.0.0.1:3141/root/plus/ \
        twine "$@";
}

This way I can debug Twine, my setup.py, and various test-upload things without ever needing real credentials at all.

But, OK. Eventually, I need to actually get the credentials and do the thing. How does that work?

1Password

1password’s command line is a little tricky to log in to (you have to eval its output, it’s not just a command), so here’s a handy shell function that will do it.

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function opme () {
    # Log this shell in to 1password.
    if ! env | grep -q OP_SESSION; then
        eval "$(op signin "$(jq -r '.latest_signin' ~/.op/config)")";
    fi;
}

Then, I have this little helper for slicing out a particular field from the OP JSON structure:

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function _op_field () {
    jq -r '.details.fields[] | select(.name == "'"${1}"'") | .value';
}

And finally, I use this to grab the item I want (named, memorably enough, “PyPI”) and invoke Twine:

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function prod.twine () {
    opme;
    local pypi_item="$(op get item PyPI)";
    env TWINE_USERNAME="$(echo ${pypi_item} | _op_field username)" \
        TWINE_PASSWORD="$(echo "${pypi_item}" | _op_field password)" \
        twine "$@";
}

LastPass

For lastpass, you can just log in (for all shells; it’s a little less secure) via lpass login; if you’ve logged in before you often don’t even have to do that, and it will just prompt you when running command that require you to be logged in; so we don’t need the preamble that 1password’s command line did.

Its version of prod.twine looks quite similar, but its plaintext output obviates the need for jq:

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function prod.twine () {
    env TWINE_USERNAME="$(lpass show PyPI --username)" \
        TWINE_PASSWORD="$(lpass show PyPI --password)" \
        twine "$@";
}

In Conclusion

“Keep secrets out of your environment” is generally a good idea, and you should always do it when you can. But, better a moment in your process environment than an eternity on your filesystem. Environment-based configuration can be a very useful stopgap for limiting the lifetimes of credentials when your tools don’t support more sophisticated approaches to secret storage.¹

Post Script

If you are interested in secure secret storage, my micro-project secretly might be of interest. Right now it doesn’t do a whole lot; it’s just a small wrapper around the excellent keyring module and the pinentry / pinentry-mac password prompt tools. secretly presents an interface both for prompting users for their credentials without requiring the command-line or env vars, and for saving them away in keychain, for tools that need to pull in an API key and don’t want to make the user manually edit a config file first.

Okay folks. Time’s up. It’s too late to say that Python’s packaging ecosystem terrible any more. I’m calling it.

Python packaging is not bad any more. If you’re a developer, and you’re trying to create or consume Python libraries, it can be a tractable, even pleasant experience.

I need to say this, because for a long time, Python’s packaging toolchain was … problematic. It isn’t any more, but a lot of people still seem to think that it is, so it’s time to set the record straight.

If you’re not familiar with the history it went something like this:

The Dawn

Python first shipped in an era when adding a dependency meant a veritable Odyssey into cyberspace. First, you’d wait until nobody in your whole family was using the phone line. Then you’d dial your ISP. Once you’d finished fighting your SLIP or PPP client, you’d ask a netnews group if anyone knew of a good gopher site to find a library that could solve your problem. Once you were done with that task, you’d sign off the Internet for the night, and wait about 48 hours too see if anyone responded. If you were lucky enough to get a reply, you’d set up a download at the end of your night’s web-surfing.

pip search it wasn’t.

For the time, Python’s approach to dependency-handling was incredibly forward-looking. The import statement, and the pluggable module import system, made it easy to get dependencies from wherever made sense.

In Python 2.0¹, Distutils was introduced. This let Python developers describe their collections of modules abstractly, and added tool support to producing redistributable collections of modules and packages. Again, this was tremendously forward-looking, if somewhat primitive; there was very little to compare it to at the time.

Fast forwarding to 2004; setuptools was created to address some of the increasingly-common tasks that open source software maintainers were facing with distributing their modules over the internet. In 2005, it added easy_install, in order to provide a tool to automate resolving dependencies and downloading them into the right locations.

The Dark Age

Unfortunately, in addition to providing basic utilities for expressing dependencies, setuptools also dragged in a tremendous amount of complexity. Its author felt that import should do something slightly different than what it does, so installing setuptools changed it. The main difference between normal import and setuptools import was that it facilitated having multiple different versions of the same library in the same program at the same time. It turns out that that’s a dumb idea, but in fairness, it wasn’t entirely clear at the time, and it is certainly useful (and necessary!) to be able to have multiple versions of a library installed onto a computer at the same time.

In addition to these idiosyncratic departures from standard Python semantics, setuptools suffered from being unmaintained. It became a critical part of the Python ecosystem at the same time as the author was moving on to other projects entirely outside of programming. No-one could agree on who the new maintainers should be for a long period of time. The project was forked, and many operating systems’ packaging toolchains calcified around a buggy, ancient version.

From 2008 to 2012 or so, Python packaging was a total mess. It was painful to use. It was not clear which libraries or tools to use, which ones were worth investing in or learning. Doing things the simple way was too tedious, and doing things the automated way involved lots of poorly-documented workarounds and inscrutable failure modes.

This is to say nothing of the fact that there were critical security flaws in various parts of this toolchain. There was no practical way to package and upload Python packages in such a way that users didn’t need a full compiler toolchain for their platform.

To make matters worse for the popular perception of Python’s packaging prowess², at this same time, newer languages and environments were getting a lot of buzz, ones that had packaging built in at the very beginning and had a much better binary distribution story. These environments learned lessons from the screw-ups of Python and Perl, and really got a lot of things right from the start.

Finally, the Python Package Index, the site which hosts all the open source packages uploaded by the Python community, was basically a proof-of-concept that went live way too early, had almost no operational resources, and was offline all the dang time.

Things were looking pretty bad for Python.

Intermission

Here is where we get to the point of this post - this is where popular opinion about Python packaging is stuck. Outdated information from this period abounds. Blog posts complaining about problems score high in web searches. Those who used Python during this time, but have now moved on to some other language, frequently scoff and dismiss Python as impossible to package, its packaging ecosystem as broken, PyPI as down all the time, and so on. Worst of all, bad advice for workarounds which are no longer necessary are still easy to find, which causes users to pre-emptively break their environments where they really don’t need to.

From The Ashes

In the midst of all this brokenness, there were some who were heroically, quietly, slowly fixing the mess, one gnarly bug-report at a time. pip was started, and its various maintainers fixed much of easy_install’s overcomplexity and many of its flaws. Donald Stufft stepped in both on Pip and PyPI and improved the availability of the systems it depended upon, as well as some pretty serious vulnerabilities in the tool itself. Daniel Holth wrote a PEP for the wheel format, which allows for binary redistribution of libraries. In other words, it lets authors of packages which need a C compiler to build give their users a way to not have one.

In 2013, setuptools and distribute un-forked, providing a path forward for operating system vendors to start updating their installations and allowing users to use something modern.

Python Core started distributing the ensurepip module along with both Python 2.7 and 3.3, allowing any user with a recent Python installed to quickly bootstrap into a sensible Python development environment with a one-liner.

A New Renaissance

I won’t give you a full run-down of the state of the packaging art. There’s already a website for that. I will, however, give you a précis of how much easier it is to get started nowadays. Today, if you want to get a sensible, up-to-date python development environment, without administrative privileges, all you have to do is:

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$ python -m ensurepip --user
$ python -m pip install --user --upgrade pip
$ python -m pip install --user --upgrade virtualenv

Then, for each project you want to do, make a new virtualenv:

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$ python -m virtualenv lets-go
$ . ./lets-go/bin/activate
(lets-go) $ _

From here on out, now the world is your oyster; you can pip install to your heart’s content, and you probably won’t even need to compile any C for most packages. These instructions don’t depend on Python version, either: as long as it’s up-to-date, the same steps work on Python 2, Python 3, PyPy and even Jython. In fact, often the ensurepip step isn’t even necessary since pip comes preinstalled. Running it if it’s unnecessary is harmless, even!

Other, more advanced packaging operations are much simpler than they used to be, too.

• Need a C compiler? OS vendors have been working with the open source community to make this easier across the board:

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  $ apt install build-essential python-dev # ubuntu $ xcode-select --install # macOS $ dnf install @development-tools python-devel # fedora C:\> REM windows C:\> start https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44266

Okay that last one’s not as obvious as it ought to be but they did at least make it freely available!

• Want to upload some stuff to PyPI? This should do it for almost any project:

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  $ pip install twine $ python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel $ twine upload dist/*

• Want to build wheels for the wild and wooly world of Linux? There’s an app⁴ for that.

Importantly, PyPI will almost certainly be online. Not only that, but a new, revamped site will be “launching” any day now³.

Again, this isn’t a comprehensive resource; I just want to give you an idea of what’s possible. But, as a deeply experienced Python expert I used to swear at these tools six times a day for years; the most serious Python packaging issue I’ve had this year to date was fixed by cleaning up my git repo to delete a cache file.

Work Still To Do

While the current situation is good, it’s still not great.

Here are just a few of my desiderata:

• We still need better and more universally agreed-upon tooling for end-user deployments.
• Pip should have a GUI frontend so that users can write Python stuff without learning as much command-line arcana.
• There should be tools that help you write and update a setup.py. Or a setup.python.json or something, so you don’t actually need to write code just to ship some metadata.
• The error messages that you get when you try to build something that needs a C compiler and it doesn’t work should be clearer and more actionable for users who don’t already know what they mean.
• PyPI should automatically build wheels for all platforms by default when you upload sdists; this is a huge project, of course, but it would be super awesome default behavior.

I could go on. There are lots of ways that Python packaging could be better.

The Bottom Line

The real takeaway here though, is that although it’s still not perfect, other languages are no longer doing appreciably better. Go is still working through a number of different options regarding dependency management and vendoring, and, like Python extensions that require C dependencies, CGo is sometimes necessary and always a problem. Node has had its own well-publicized problems with their dependency management culture and package manager. Hackage is cool and all but everything takes a literal geological epoch to compile.

As always, I’m sure none of this applies to Rust and Cargo is basically perfect, but that doesn’t matter, because nobody reading this is actually using Rust.

My point is not that packaging in any of these languages is particularly bad. They’re all actually doing pretty well, especially compared to the state of the general programming ecosystem a few years ago; many of them are making regular progress towards user-facing improvements.

My point is that any commentary suggesting they’re meaningfully better than Python at this point is probably just out of date. Working with Python packaging is more or less fine right now. It could be better, but lots of people are working on improving it, and the structural problems that prevented those improvements from being adopted by the community in a timely manner have almost all been addressed.

Go! Make some virtualenvs! Hack some setup.pys! If it’s been a while and your last experience was really miserable, I promise, it’s better now.

Am I wrong? Did I screw up a detail of your favorite language? Did I forget to mention the one language environment that has a completely perfect, flawless packaging story? Do you feel the need to just yell at a stranger on the Internet about picayune details? Feel free to get in touch!